Of the several lingering rumors around Apple’s hardware strategy, there are two
that tend to rise to the top:

Will there be ARM Macs, and

Where’s my new Mac Pro?

Often we think of these separately. ARM chips have been the backbone of phones
and tablets for some time, but that’s obviously the slot they’ll stay in. If a
Mac were to be ARM-based, it’d be the MacBook Air or something equally
lightweight, both in pounds and in power — the Mac Pro wouldn’t enter into the
equation at all.

As Swift enters its fourth year in public and continues to evolve, it becomes
more and more attractive to add new features using the language — but for those
of us who are blessed with large legacy codebases, crossing the divide between
Objective-C and Swift can be a burden. What’s more, some of the language
features in Objective-C that can help ease this transition aren’t necessarily
well-documented or publicized.

This is an issue I’ve been grappling with in different projects for some time,
and so when the opportunity arose to discuss the topic at our local Xcoders
meetup, I took it. I think this talk had the fewest slides of any presentation
I’ve ever given, so I won’t reproduce them here, but the example project is
available on GitHub — both before and after
the changes from the talk. You can also find a video of the talk on
Vimeo.

Toying around with some code on the bus this morning, I came across an
interesting fact about region flag emoji. Among the thousands of emoji that the
Unicode standard defines, 270 of them represent region flags, each corresponding
to a two-character region code: “us” means 🇺🇸, for example.

My curiosity was this: is there a way to programmatically generate the flag
emoji 🇺🇸 from the string "us"? I was afraid that, like many other emoji, the
flags would each have a unique name — something like REGIONAL FLAG UNITED STATES
— and would require a lookup table to translate between the basic string "us"
and the resulting emoji. Not so!